Susan Bergeson, treasurer of the Llano Estacado Audubon Society, checks a list of the different birds at Whisperwood Pond in Lubbock Saturday morning as part of The Great Backyard Bird Count.

The women, members of the Llano Estacado Audubon Society, were among dozens of birders taking an inventory of the feathered flyers Friday through Monday in South Plains skies and lakes.

"It's a lot more fun than you might think," said Susan Bergeson, the local organization's treasurer, as she counted birds with group vice president Aveline Hewetson.

The pair counted hundreds of birds Saturday morning near a Lubbock playa lake as part of the four-day national Great Backyard Bird Count organized by the national Audubon society and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Among the birds were 210 Canada geese, 44 ruddy ducks, seven hooded mergansers and a dozen other fowl creatures they could see from their vantage point

near the parking lot of Plains Capital Bank at Fourth Street and Raleigh Avenue.

Hewetson said birding is America's most popular sport and can be enjoyed by people of all ages.

"It's something you can do your whole life - it's kind of like tennis," she said.

And the playa lake near the bank was a perfect place to watch birds, Hewetson said.

"It has a nice diversity of birds ... and parking's good," she said.

The goal of the bird count, she said, is not to determine specific numbers. It's population and migration trends that researchers with the Audubon Society and Cornell are looking for.

"And birding can be specific," Hewetson said.

She's attended several seminars focusing on the difference between Canada geese and cackling geese, species that are often misidentified.

Hoping to clarify the difference between the cackling goose and Canada goose, Bergeson was eager to demonstrate one of her secret weapons in birding - the iBird application on her iPhone.

She pulled the device out of her car and, after several slides and pokes from her finger, a cackling goose appeared on her screen.

"See how the little nose is shorter and it's got more slope to it," Bergeson said, the smart phone in her hand showing a cackling goose as dozens of the cacklers floated on the playa lake in front of her.

Then a cackling sound blurted from the phone.

"See, that's what it sounds like," she said, before comparing the cackler's noise to the longer, throatier utterances of the Canada goose.

Bergeson said the application has come in handy for her during an evening search for owls. The owls, she said, initially were hard to find because they weren't giving a hoot.

"When you go out birding with it, what you do is play whatever owl you're looking for and they'll respond to you," she said.

South Plains residents, Hewetson said, are well positioned to see a large variety of birds.

"Well over 400 birds come through the Lubbock area - almost half of the birds in the country," she said.

A highlight of the women's 15-minute count at the lake came in the form of a somewhat unusual visit from a pelican.

"He's just hanging out - a pelican in Lubbock," Hewetson said as the usually coastal pelican flew over the lake.

Lubbock birders often are treated to uncommon bird sightings, she said, such as a 2002 visit by a gyrfalcon that likely visited the city when it strayed off its normal path near the Arctic ocean.

She said bird watchers from around the area traveled to the water tower near Avenue X and 34th Street, where for several weeks the gyrfalcon made regular evening appearances.

"He did it like clockwork and he would catch the last rays of the sun in the evening," Hewetson said.

Participants of the count were asked to go to an outdoor location, count birds for at least 15 minutes and record their findings on a piece of paper, said Nancy Neill, the Llano Estacado Audubon Society ambassador for Lubbock Parks and Recreation.

The bird count is the largest of its kind in North America, and last year collected more than 93,000 checklists from across the country, according to the Audubon Society.

Checklists can be entered online through the project's Web site, www.birdcount.org. Counters could perform more than one count in a day at different locations, but were asked to record their findings on a separate list. The deadline for submission is March 1.

"Anyone who would have liked to do it this year - there's always next year," Hewetson said.